Saturday, March 2, 2013

Since I’ve had Tyler as a roommate, I’ve grown used to watching Wizards of Waverly Place but when a
commercial was playing on Disney about an episode where one of the main characters,
a sarcastic teenage girl named Alex (played by Selena Gomez) casts a spell on
herself that makes all the parts people don’t like about her put into a cell
where they are trapped and it later comes back to get her, something started to
seem familiar.Like the way Buddhism
teaches energy cannot be destroyed, even though Alex’s less likeable traits
don’t show up in her, they still exist.Also, doesn’t Alex’s behavior seem sort of familiar to what we do every
day (most of us at least) at least unconsciously?Haven’t we all been told, by school, parents,
religion, work, etc., that certain things about ourselves are not acceptable
and put them into a little box where they can be contained so that they won’t
show up when they’re not wanted?And
then they just seem to come out at us when we least expect it, causing
embarrassment in our personal and professional lives.

According to a
documentary The Shadow Effect (which
is not Buddhist, by the way, but has teachings in it that are similar to
Buddhism) we all repress some part of ourselves that we are told is
inappropriate and then later they come back at us and embarrass us in our
lives.In Britain, a social worker
finally snapped from the pressures of his job and restrained a twenty-year old
woman with learning difficulties.Other
examples of this can be seen in politicians, celebrities, and clergymen.Alex in Wizards
of Waverly Place puts her unwanted characteristics in a mirror just as we
put them in a pit in our gut and never let them out and likewise, Alex’s alter
ego comes out to get her.But what do we
do about this “shadow side?”

In meditation, we
look at ourselves without judging or condemning.Even though a voice in our head may say
something about who are at that point, we realize those thoughts are not who we
are and we let them come and go without holding onto them.Our “negative sides” are merely traumas we
are reliving every day in our heads but meditation helps people to transform
those traumas into wisdom.These
“traumas” are energy and energy cannot be destroyed, according to both Buddhism
and science.But through meditation, our
traumas need not remain what they are because energy does not stay in one state
forever, and neither do our traumas.

True, I don’t normally watch a movie like Sharkboy and Lavagirl, but like Spy Kids, things about it caught my
attention for their Buddhist significance as my roommate watched it in our
dorm.The movie revolves around a boy
named Max who invents a dream world which he records in his dream journal.One day, after a particularly bad day of
school, people from his dream world, Sharkboy and Lavagirl, find him at school
and take him his dream world.

“Life is but a dream.”

Buddhists have
sayings, “Life is a dream,” “Reality is an illusion.”This is often taken to mean that whatever’s
going on isn’t real.We’ve just created
it with our minds and not being able to get out of it is a sign of
weakness.This is not true.On the contrary, Buddhist really believe
something more like this, “A dream is reality.”The problem is the differences between Western and Buddhist languages,
such as Pali, Chinese, or Tibetan.When
I took Exploring World Religions, Eastern Civilization, and Religions of the
East at Johnson County Community College all with the same teacher summed up
the worldview of the Chinese, “Experience vs. Order.”The way these languages work I guess is that
the category something belongs in doesn’t precede the thing itself.For example, saying, “I am tall,” is
basically the same thing as saying, “Tall is me.”

Buddhists don’t believe reality is an illusion.Rather something starts as an illusion and becomes reality.A Buddhist saying states that, “With our
minds, we create the world.”Take a
child who’s been told for years that he will misbehave by his parents and he
later does.Children learn from elders.

Another example would be the process of creative
visualization made popular in the West by writer Shakti Gawain.One simply visualizes something happening for
it to take place.The theory being is
that it trains people to do the things that cause these things to happen.Celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Will Smith,
and Jim Carrey stated they have all used visualization to help them achieve
their goals.Will Smith imagined no
longer living in poverty and that became a reality with his film and television
successes.Jim Carrey stated once that
in 1994, he wrote a check to himself for “services in acting.”In 1995, he received that amount of money he
wrote to himself for starring in the movie Dumb
and Dumber.

The world we inhabit is more or less a product of our minds.Saying this, it should be noted that it does
not mean it is the product we intended.But what goes on in the world is more or
less a product of what our mind has believed.When we fear the results of our tests, they may turn out to be
unsatisfactory.We may think we’re going
to find love, but really we’re only doing it because we think if we don’t,
we’ll be miserable, and often times we are.An Eastern axiom states that the world is a projection.Take a social worker whose performance is
called unsatisfactory and the social worker believes him and she takes it to be
a remark about her personally.She may
not be the one who called herself that in the first place, but in believing so,
she considers her critic to be making her feel unhappy with her performance,
when really the only one making her feel so unhappy with herself is her.Maybe she reacted that way because she is unhappy with herself.Be defining herself as a social worker, her
feelings of how other’s perceive her are based on how they see her doing her
job.Without this view of herself that
she has created, no coworkers comment could be able to hurt her so much inside.

Spy Kids isn’t normally the
kind of movie I would watch.But as I
heard the actions and the dialogue as my roommate, Tyler watched it in our
dorm, there were some things that caught my attention in it, apart from the
brilliant performances of Mike Judge.God, he is great.

What eventually
struck me as significant about this movie is the premise where a menace wrecks
chaos by trying and failing to go back in time.At the end of the movie it is said by one of the children that the
menace cannot go back in time, merely create different versions of himself that
exist in a similar scenario as the past.It’s true.You can’t travel back
in time, or forward.The only time that
exists is now.

Innocence of Children

At one point in
the movie, the stepmother of the kids tells them that the Spy Kids program was
created by the government because adults dawdle in taking action since they
over think things.According to
Buddhism, unhappiness is created when we don’t participate in this moment.Experiences we have make it much harder to
take part in the now as we get older because they shape our views so much.After they occur, we feel like reliving them
again when similar things happen.And
when different types of situations occur, we reflect on how things used to
be.Of course, we can’t just be naïve
for the rest of our lives.We have to
grow and mature.Present awareness is
hard work but once our present situation is lived at this moment, we no longer
have to view it with the same feeling we learned from doing it before.Christ, interestingly enough, said to his
followers, “You must become children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”The Celtic people had a concept of “the Wise
Child.”Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said
that, “Zen minds are like beginner’s minds.” They are very fresh.What’s best is we don’t have to forget all
are experiences or start things completely anew to be like “Zen minds.”We simply have to stop lumping old
experiences with new ones and transcend the conceptual mind.This is not to say we must stop having names
for things, but we need to understand the Buddhist principle of Sunyatta, or emptiness.Look at a picture of a pear and see how you
describe it.One might describe it as
red and round, but then take a red bouncy ball.You may notice that it is also red and round, and yet you don’t lump a
bouncy ball and a pear in the same category.It may be because you don’t define it as “red and round” but that is
true of it, as are a number of other things you could notice about it (rubbery,
shiny, etc.)Similarly, though we may
encounter experiences similar to our old ones, we respect that no two
experiences, like snowflakes, are exactly the same, and we no longer have to
apply the lessons of old experiences where they can hold us back in life.

Despite public “awareness” on autism, nothing really has changed.In schools autistic people sit in different
classrooms from their neurotypical peers, apart from the mainstream of the
school, turning them into outcasts, because typical public school classrooms
are not equipped to teach them, despite it being perfectly possible, which in
turn, damages their chances of reaching their full potential rather than only
being able to be a UPS driver, while their neurotypical peers go off to
exciting careers of their own.The
“cost” of autism cannot be used to justify the status quo.According to Time Magazine’s 100 New Scientific Discoveries asthma, cancer, lead
poisoning, and developmentally disabilities combined
account for only 2.8% of our national health care budget meaning autism
accounts for only a fraction of that cost.The fact is, discrimination is unconstitutional, and does not fit a
legal exception to this rule.But you,
unless you have autism yourself, are maybe wondering, ‘What does this have to
do with me?’Valid question.

The fact is, only
educated people vote.Education affects
voting because it teaches people about the issues in our country.Without a universally relevant and equally
accessible public education system, democracy is compromised.Of course you may be thinking, it doesn’t
affect me.I mean it’s not like the
price of gas is going up.Ok, good
point.But what does cause the price of gas to go up?The Arab Spring, right?And what is the Arab Spring about?Ding,
ding: democracy!And what country is
looked to by the rest of the world to model democracy?Well, us.

The Economist
ranks countries according to four levels of democracy: Full democracy (That’s
us), flawed democracy (India, Mexico), hybrid regimes (Venezuela, Kenya), and
authoritarian regime (China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, etc.,).South Africa, currently a flawed democracy,
still experiences huge setbacks, even after three decades of the apartheid
being over.Miners protests, much like
the Arab Spring protests, have caused inflation to rise significantly.South Africa modeled much of their
post-Apartheid democracy after ours just like they modeled their Apartheid
after our segregation.Whenever there is
a patterned inconsistency in democracy, there seems to be in varying degrees,
large amounts of social unrest.Whenever
the Arab World seems to suffer this, oil prices tend to go up.You might want to consider how we integrate
autistics and other people with cognitive differences if you want to go to your
job or see a long-distance partner.

Autism rates have been seen as going up in the past few years in the
United States, or if not at least being recognized more.The people who want to cure it are often
rebuffed by activists, particularly autistic people, who say they don’t want to
be “cured” because they deserve to be respected for the content of their
character, rather than their abilities.One group of people in on all this is the people who want to prevent autism, rather than cure
it.While they do not exactly seem one
hundred percent in the same class as the curebies, most autistics, including
myself, would not consider their views to be any better.Both seem to believe in a world where there
are no autistic people, whether in the future or in the present.How would it be for a group of people to
imagine the world with no gays or no blacks?Some may say that prevention is wished for as a result of compassion,
wishing autistic people not to suffer discrimination.But we also cannot overlook the fact that the
people advocating prevention, like the curebies, seem to hold autistic people
accountable for their suffering, rather than the people who discriminate
against them.Real respect for any group
of people would mean giving them the same rights as any other group and
respecting its individuals for the content of their character, not their
abilities, or lack of thereof, in both present and future.Real respect for
a group of people such as people with autism means they can be on this earth
for the rest of time and don’t have to change to be respected while others can
do so and remain the same.Anything else
would be only partial respect or a total lack of it.Did Rosa Parks risk going to jail so that
Americans would all be partially equal?Did Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X
risk their lives so African Americans would be partially integrated?No.It seems all these
individuals put themselves at great risk so others good know real genuine
equality and integrity, even if it did not occur in their lifetimes, which
means respect for the rights of people that is not dependent on them becoming
more like their societies majority, or minority for that matter, at all
times.You have only two choices.You either have un-fake respect for people
with autism, or you don’t.